The Photon Factory is a synchrotron

Synchrotron

A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator in which the magnetic field and the electric field are carefully synchronised with the travelling particle beam. The proton synchrotron was originally conceived by Sir Marcus Oliphant...

 located at KEK

KEK

, known as KEK, is a national organization whose purpose is to operate the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, which is situated in Tsukuba of Ibaraki prefecture. Established in 1997. The term "KEK" is also used to refer to the laboratory itself, which employs approximately 900 employees...

, in Tsukuba, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, about fifty kilometres from Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

.

There are two major facilities, the Photon Factory itself which is a 2.5GeV synchrotron with a beam current of around 350mA, and the PF-AR 'Advanced Ring for Pulsed X-Rays', which is a 6.5GeV machine running in a single-bunch mode with a beam current of around 35mA.

Its macromolecular crystallography beamline

Beamline

In particle physics, a beamline is the line in a linear accelerator along which a beam of particles travels. It may also refer to the line of travel within a bending section such as a storage ring or cyclotron, or an external beam extracted from a cyclic accelerator.In materials science, physics,...

 is used substantially for Japan's structural genomics

Structural genomics

Structural genomics seeks to describe the 3-dimensional structure of every protein encoded by a given genome. This genome-based approach allows for a high-throughput method of structure determination by a combination of experimental and modeling approaches...

project.